叙事詩, 年代記, 予言 : 古典ジャワ文学にみられる伝統的歴史観

Abstract

The vast body of classical Javanese literature that directly or indirectly deals with what the Javanese perceived to be their past may be more coherently analyzed by defining "history" as the "world with its own time and space comprising the narrated stories of the past, the world that was imagined and shared by the reader." The aim of this paper is to explicate from the narratological point of view how the "history" was structured and narrated, and to trace its development through several stages in premodern Javanese literature. The first and most fundamental of all stages is that of Old Javanese literature, where the Indian theory of four yuga was adopted as the framework of "history" consisting of different ages, into which episodes of both Indian and Javanese origin were inserted as "modules." It is on this "framework and module" principle that later Javanese literature, such as chronicles and prophetic literature, was able to expand the "history" of Java into a narrative ranging from Adam through the Pandawa to King Jayabaya and Muslim Mataram. On the other hand, the main narrative device of connecting the time of a narrated story and that of the reader changed from incarnation in the earlier stage to genealogy and prophecy, both of which had their precursors in Old Javanese literature, in the later stage.